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Reader question: Please explain “racial profiling” in this sentence: “The incident raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a victim of racial profiling.” My comments: A profile is a side view of a person’s head. A profile, by extension, also means a rough description of that person, giving short but important details about him or her. Profiling, or offender profiling, refers to the process of the police studying a crime, such as murder, and making initial judgments about the general character of the person who did it. Racial profiling, therefore, refers to profiling according to race, i.e. the color of one’s skin. For instance, black drivers are more likely stopped in the street in America whenever there’s a murder done round the block, a traffic accident or when the police are just doing random checks for this and that. White drivers are stopped less because presumably, in the eye of the police officers, white people are less capable of crimes or wrongdoing. That’s a prejudice against white people, of course. White people are quite capable of crimes and wrongdoing, if not more so than blacks or Asians or Hispanics. The point is, racial profiling is based on prejudice – pre-reached conclusions – and that is wrong. Anyways, here is a recent media example. I know I usually give more than one example, in order to facilitate your putting the phrase or expression in question in future use but in today’s case, one example suffices. It is an example in which American civil rights leader Jesse Jackson condemns the fact that black people in Britain (yes, Great Britain) are 26 times more likely than whites to face stop and search by police. Mr. Jackson’s article is written with such clarity, lucidity and eloquence that I’m giving you the story in full as well. | 
